Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for navigating interactive visualizations of a business analysis application and more particularly to navigating interactive visualizations of a business analysis application based on collaborative filtering.
Generally speaking, business analytics are applications or functions used to perform analysis such as statistical analysis, what-if analysis, various planning and monitoring analysis, etc., on a set of business data such as financial and/or accounting data, supply chain information, project management information, etc. In business analytic applications, a popular trend is to use visualizations to represent these sets of data because there is more and more data and presenting it in a tabular form is not insightful or even useful. So most analytic software produces and presents graphs of different types which can be navigated and interacted with by users through a visualization tool. An analytic application queries the data and then presents the results to a user as a table or graph (“visualization”). Users can further analyze the data by manipulating the visualizations in search of insight.
But even a simple visualization produces many views, i.e., certain perspective on that visualization, e.g., sales by region, by product, by sales team, etc. For example, a simple visualization that shows revenue trend of a business by region by product by time. If the business operates in 4 regions, sells 4 products, and has been in business for 4 years. The combination of these parameters results in 64 views of sales data. But in many actual implementations, each region is made up of dozens of countries and/or hundreds of regions. If the visualization allows the user to view sales by country and/or region, there will be thousands and thousands of additional views. In the real world, a business might also have many more products. Thus, the number of possible views could easily exceed what a human being can manage, and only some views (alone or in combination) possibly contain insight. A major problem for users of such visualizations becomes determining which views contain the insights that will be helpful to them. Current analytic applications provide no support to the users in finding insightful views of a visualization. Often users won't even know where to start their exploration. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for navigating interactive visualizations of a business analysis application.